15+ Static Site Generators to Complement Your Headless CMS

While static site generators are nothing new, there's newfound interest in them due to the interest in headless CMSs PHOTO:
Torsten Dettlaff

As the headless CMS hype continues, brands are mulling over front-end solutions — experimenting with different heads for their headless CMS, if you will.

Static site generators (SSGs) aren’t new by any means, but interest in them grows as the interest in headless and decoupled solutions grows.

What Is a Static Site Generator?

Static site generators operate as a halfway house between operating a hand-coded HTML site and a fully fledged CMS. With an SSG, you generate an HTML-only website using (mostly) markdown files, templates and sometimes a few plugins. That site can then be uploaded to a server, remaining unchanged until the next time the SSG is run.

Their simplicity and agility makes them a good solution for enterprises looking to deploy microsites and landing pages.

It would be impossible to discuss static site generators without mentioning Jekyll.

Jekyll provides easy migration options from platforms like WordPress, and supports Markdown, Textile and Liquid. Jekyll is also blogger friendly, with permalinks, categories, pages, posts and custom layouts coming as part of the package.

The Octopress website hasn’t been updated in a while, but the project is still going strong on Github. Identifying as a “blogging framework for hackers,” Octopress started out as a modified version of Jekyll, so Jekyll users will feel right at home using it.

Octopress allows users to easily embed code into their posts from gists, jsFiddle or their own file systems, all with Solarized styling. It can integrate with Twitter, Pinboard, Google Analytics, and Disqus.

Metalsmith is essentially a collection of user-defined plugins that empower it to build just about anything, from simple blogs to complex apps. On top of a ton of plugins, there is Markdown support, and when it comes to templating languages, you can make use of Handlebars or Jade.

It’s not the easiest tool to adopt, but it is one of the most powerful.

Powered by Python, Pelican supports reStructeredText, Markdown and Asciidoc. Plus, it has plugins, themes, multilingual capabilities as well as Atom and RSS feed support. All of its Jinja2 templates can be easily customized, too.

Written in PHP, Sculpin stands out from the crowd — but not by much. It converts Markdown files, Twig templates and standard HTML into a static HTML site that can be easily deployed.

Furthermore, Sculpin is built on Symfony's HTTP Kernel. Thus, you can use Symfony Bundles to extend Sculpin for any advanced functionality you need without extending Sculpin directly. Like Hudo, Sculpin also has its own on-site community.

Like Roots, Middleman was born out of a digital agency’s need for an SSG. This time though, it was Instrument who did the building. Middleman is a Ruby-based open source static website generator relied upon by the likes of Mailchimp and Vox Media.

Middleman uses Ruby’s standard embedded Ruby (ERB) templates engine, although this can easily be swapped for Haml or Liquid.

Plus, Wintersmith allows users to bundle JavaScript with Browserify, write reusable styles with LESS, Sass or Stylus, and leverage reusable web components. Its Github page is home to a good range of community made plugins.

Nikola is an open source SSG written in Python. It serves up a healthy amount of themes, plugins and shortcodes. For speed purposes, Nikola uses doit, which provides incremental rebuilds — meaning that it only rebuilds the pages that need rebuilding, saving CPU time and upload bandwidth.

Hyde is another SSG written in Python. Hyde’s mission is to remove the pain points involved in creating and maintaining static websites. One way it achieves this is by providing Instant previews using a built-in webserver that regenerates content if needed.

Hyde is also built with a stripped down engine where even features like metadata are added as plugins to keep the engine lean.

DocPad takes your content from several sources, like files on your computer, and renders them into fast static pages. As well as supporting an array of markup languages, DocPad serves up a wide range of skeletons and plugins allowing you to add functionality like WYSIWYG editing.

Nanoc is suitable for building both personal blogs and enterprise sites. Nanoc supports Markdown, AsciiDoc and Textile, as well as a range of templating languages, from eRuby to Mustache. Nanoc also supports multilingual sites.

Honorable Mentions:

As mentioned above, you do not lack for choice in the SSG world. So if none of the options above sound right for you, try one of the following:

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